So here’s a recap. I’ve decided to venture into a project of reading the Bible and blogging my reflections online, all within one year. I’m not saying that I’ll read and blog every day (although I’ll try!). I am committing that I will consistently read and post. Ideally, this would happen every day, but realistically I’m going to cut myself a little slack if I don’t get to post.
Now, the next task is to decide how to break up the entire Bible into one year for reading. I recognize that this task is not an easy one. Not only is the Bible rather long, but it can also be really dense. Many parts of the Bible contain deep material that needs time for processing and reflection.
In spite of this challenge of reading a long, dense text in 365 days, I need to decide how to break up the reading. There are 66 books in the Bible that contain 1189 chapters. That’s an average of 3.25 chapters per day. So here are the options:
1. I can read the Bible from beginning to end, starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation. This option would provide ease in remembering what I’m doing, focusing on one section of the Bible at a time, and making sure I’m on track to finish in one year.
2. There’s also the chronological approach. This option entails reading the Bible in the order that historians think the events occurred. I like this option in that I see the biblical narrative from the beginning and events are placed within the historical context of when they occurred. But I don’t like how difficult this one is to organize.
3. Another option I have is to read different sections of the Bible each day. For instance, I could read a section of the Old Testament, a section of the New Testament, and passages from Psalms and Proverbs. I like the variety that this approach offers (that is, when I’m reading a part of the Bible that I don’t understand or—should I say it?—is boring, I can take a break from this reading and go to other reading that I either like better or understand more). However, this approach also worries me in the sense that my blogging wouldn’t have as much focus as other approaches and may be disjointed.
4. Another approach is to read the NT first and the OT second. Reading the NT first would allow me to read about Jesus, the apostles, the church, and the early Christians at the beginning of this project; however, I fear that I wouldn’t have the historical context that the OT brings. I do like this one, though. It’s different.
Well, I’m sure there are other approaches but these are the four I’m choosing from for this task.
What do you think I should do? Do I have any readers out there yet?
